Mundaun's greatest achievement is the Swiss Alps setting that's brought to life with tangible vigor.
Loop Hero functions as a statement of persistence in the face of the seemingly insurmountable.
Hitman 3, for better and worse, splits the difference between player freedom and focused storytelling.
To criticize Cyberpunk 2077 for being hypocritical and conservative feels almost beside the point.
The Pathless ultimately buries anything it might have to say in a stupefying level of cliché.
The game noticeably stumbles as it attempts to more overtly address the darkness beneath its concept.
Carto gets a lot of brain-bending mileage from its central mechanic.
It's difficult to escape a sense that the game's ambition far outstrips the number of unique people it can plausibly render.
In theory, its intricacies should be bracing, but in practice the fixation on spacing and formation further slows down the pace.
Spelunky 2 remains staunchly committed to its immaculate core design.
Windbound is an exploration game whose sense of exploration is painfully rigid.
Make & Break is at its best when injecting variety into the campaign, not only mixing up the environments but the game modes.
Few of the game's problems would be insurmountable in the face of an engaging narrative.
Though you encounter familiar configurations of levers and passageways and other obstacles, the mansion’s rooms all feel distinct, subtly interconnected in a way you likely won’t even notice unless you hit the load screen and see that every puzzle is coherently plotted on a zoomed-out side view of the mysterious mansion. Creaks hums along smoothly and pleasantly without calling attention to itself, to its sporadic detriment but mainly to its strength.
The most impressive thing about the game is still the strength and specificity of its vision.
The world of the game may be small, but it brims with a weird sense of life.
The game reveals its brilliance by constantly and subtly reconfiguring the emotions behind erasure.
There's considerable joy to poking at the edges of its ingenious interlocking systems to see what happens.
For Cloudpunk, hardship is merely the wallpaper for a pretty yet thinly conceived gaming experience.
After a while, the game inadvertently becomes about the cost and upkeep of civilization.